Florida Museum of Natural History

The butterfly exhibit was particularly appealing to me because of the massive garden on the inside. There is one massive tree with spikes going all the way to the top. I have never seen a tree that looks like that before. This made me appreciate and think about how many amazing things nature has to offer that I have no idea even exist. Seeing this made me then look at everything in the museum with a fresh childlike sense of wonder. I questioned why I think something that I haven't seen before is more impressive to me than something that I have seen hundreds of times. I realized that every living creature is a miracle and I loved the opportunity to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Talking to one of the people who worked at the museum gave me a greater understanding of how fragile our ecosystem actually is. She said that if some of the butterflies escaped, they could decimate whole crops and destroy the natural species in the area. One of my friends works at the museum doing research on moths, this research on one specific topic could possibly show us that we are about to destroy a whole species ff living creatures. He is just looking at one type of moth. Every creature took thousands and thousands of years to evolve. We need to start appreciating the creatures we live with and realize how wrong it is for us to destroy anything that took that long to create.

I often see man and nature as two separate entities often battling one another. This idea is so far from the truth. Seeing all the exhibits with the Native Americans remind me that we are a part of nature and nature is apart of us. Seeing this made me think outside of my normal life about how it would be to life with nature instead of against it. Life would not be more comfortable but would it be more or less happy? If humans evolved to live in nature why do we now try so hard to escape nature. Even when we go camping with the sole propose of "getting back to nature," nothing is natural. We bring plastic tents, eat processed food, bring our own purified water, and have so many gadgets that they all don't usually get used. The Native American exhibit made me think about our massive disconnect with our natural roots and how this may flaw the way we think about things.